Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

12

The only thing I remember from my first trip to Ljubljana is the wakefulness of our fellow passengers. Nobody tried to sleep that night. No one’s head was lowered in exhaustion, not even for a moment. In my memory, everyone around us sat upright in their seats, and in palpably impatient expectation, stared through the darkness, through which we slowly made our way towards our destination. My mother was certainly wide awake the whole night through, and urged me from time to time to get some sleep, repeating that it would be a very long trip, and I would be exhausted for days if I didn’t catch some shut-eye. But the thought that, at eleven years old, I’d finally be getting grandparents, who were already waiting to meet us, was too exciting. The other passengers kept looking over at me all night, as if wondering why I, who was too young to understand the horror they were fleeing and that kept them awake, didn’t fall asleep.

The city of Ljubljana, into which we finally stumbled in August 1991, after more than thirteen hours’ drive, was never again as white and dreamy as it was that morning. It was still summer, but the air there had a northerly harshness to it, and I was mad at the bus driver, who was dozing in his seat as we waited to board the local bus to my grandparent’s village. He made us wait outside the bus until the clock struck precisely half past seven, and it was time to leave. Only then was he ready to stretch his arms, light a cigarette and step outside to begrudgingly open the boot for us. Then he watched with poorly hidden pleasure as we struggled to lift our four large suitcases and two boxes inside. After all this, he gladly charged us for our effort, including the luggage surcharge.

It was there, in the Ljubljana bus station, in front of an annoying representative of Slovenian public transport, that I first heard my mother speak a foreign language. Slovenian, the language that should have been my mother tongue, if she hadn’t insisted on tearing herself away from her family and pushing through her life on broken Serbo-Croatian, even when she talked to her baby. Dusha messed up the words to fairy tales, made her own freestyle versions of children’s songs, and my father had fun singing along with her mistakes, even after many years, when her Serbo-Croatian had achieved a near-perfect, military timbre. On that white morning, when my mother asked the grumpy bus driver a few questions in Slovene, I couldn’t understand a word. But the whole way, I had this feeling that I didn’t even know the person who spoke from within her. That was the first time my mother had seemed foreign to me, and when the bus finally stopped and we got off, along with a few other passengers, I felt that she was one of them, one of these weird foreign people who spoke some weird foreign language.

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The expression worn by Dushan Podlogar when he saw us on his doorstep, with our six pieces of luggage, was that of a man who would like to quickly shut the door and pretend it was all just a dream. My grandfather was not a person who would be pleased with irrefutable evidence of something he thought was right, which Dusha’s humble ringing at his doorbell certainly was. My grandfather didn’t need evidence to prove that he was right, especially not in a form as annoying as we proved to be. He had a meticulously orderly daily routine, and any intrusion, particularly one unannounced, into his minutely precise schedule was calamitous. Luckily for us, in his manic tidiness and fear of what the neighbours would think, he could not bring himself to leave women and children on his doorstep, where they would be on exhibit for all the village spies to see. Finally he jerked his head, which mother understood as an invitation to quickly get her ass and her stuff inside, with ‘stuff’ presumably including me.

Just then her renowned curiosity led Maria Podlogar to the front door. Unlike her husband, who got out of the way as soon as he invited us in, she was more of a moving obstacle. She was too upset to say anything, but she was probably afraid that, if she left the entryway, she would miss something that we might want to say to her. Of course, I didn’t speak Slovene and my mother, after thirteen years, didn’t feel like starting a conversation that she knew very well couldn’t end well. So Maria managed only to pull herself together enough to shove slippers into our hands and walk us to the kitchen, where Dushan, in the meantime, had put on his strict police chief face, and awaited us. This face made clear that we would be interrogated, and that judgment would come unto us from on high. Mother probably knew this face very well, and it quickly disarmed her, so she sat at the edge of the table, like a scared little girl. Dushan indicated for me to sit down beside him.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, after a few moments of silence, by way of his opening speech.

Mother jumped in to tell him, her voice noticeably shaky; adding that I didn’t speak Slovene, but Dushan just repeated the question to me, with the same tone, without looking at her.

‘What’s your name?’

I told him that I was Vladan, and he unexpectedly smiled, stretched his hand towards me and, not realizing his strength, gave me a pretty rough pat on the head. From that moment until his death, I was the only one for whom this fearsome former police chief had spontaneously demonstrated obvious signs of affection and eventually, something scientists might categorize in the phylum of love.

‘Would you like to eat something?’ he then asked, and moved his hand as if it held an imaginary spoon.

I nodded and he quietly said, with a strict tone, ‘You must say please,’ but followed this immediately with a smile, no doubt attributing my lack of manners to my no-good parents. At least that was how I interpreted his knife-sharp look across the table at his daughter.

So my first Slovenian word was prosim, ‘please,’ which I repeated after my grandfather, and which immediately made me his favourite, a fact he announced to the world with a barely visible nod, and which my mother could never understand, much less accept. Naturally, Dusha never admitted this to me, but I’m sure that her own futile relationship was also characterized by her jealousy of the attention Dushan showed me, among many other factors. At this first attempt at communication with his long-lost grandson, she was already all sour smiles; the sort a person can’t hide even if they want to.

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It was our first visit with my grandparents, and we were already making up for lost time. To begin with, Dushan had decided that my mother and I really must relive, play-by-play, Slovenia’s Ten-Day War for independence from Yugoslavia, since we had been absent from it without his permission. So Dusha was dubbed, at least privately, as a state traitor, an aggressor against the sovereignty of the young state of Slovenia, as well as other unflattering labels hidden between his spoken words, interjections and indefinable sounds that erupted from Dushan in her direction. It turned out that Dushan Podlogar had irreversibly lost his faith in self-governing socialism, in Tito, in the Party, in brotherhood and unity, in the Non-Aligned Movement, in the working classes, and much more, all at the very moment his only daughter had eloped with an officer of the Yugoslav Army. The former police chief, who once struck fear into the hearts of transgressors of the socialist order, had welcomed the downfall of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and was now a brushed-up Slovenian nationalist with exemplary mileage. During the Ten-Day War, he had bravely stood up to the invaders on the other side of his television set. And when the invaders shamelessly marched straight into his house, in the form of this treacherous daughter of his, he unleashed upon the enemy his full patriotic arsenal. So, after the spontaneous and frequent blows she had received from Danilo and Risto, particularly during the evening news, Dusha was on the receiving end of haymakers of a different political leaning courtesy of her father. To him, Dusha was a representative of the enemy, one of Milošević’s Serbs now under his own roof, whom he would oblige to hear all his thoughts, comments, arguments and insults. In the main, this role of enemy was justly divided between Nedelko Borojević and Slobodan Milošević, neither of whom Dushan would mention by name. His constant bombardment never seemed to affect Dusha, and I felt like Maria’s passivity in this combat made it worse for her. There were days when I heard my mother shaking off her pain on silent Maria, blaming her for Dushan’s words, despising her for applauding him with her silence from behind the closed kitchen door. Maybe my mother was afraid of her father, maybe she had never loved him but she never expressed such open contempt for him as she did for her mother. Dushan’s words might have stung, but Maria’s silence spat. It was a betrayal that Dusha never got over and in those days, I suspected that Dusha had fled this home and country not as much from Dushan as from Maria and her submission, which Dusha’s stubborn and rebellious nature could never accept.

After a few days, Dusha unexpectedly announced the end of Podlogar’s Ten-Day War and told us all that she’d found a job and rented an apartment in the Fužine neighborhood of Ljubljana. The only thing Dushan could utter, upon hearing this, was ‘To each his own.’ Maria, of course, vanished into the kitchen without comment. I later saw her there, trying to hide her tears, before returning to the living room, once more wearing the indifferent face that allowed her to survive this thing called life.

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So my mother and I ended up in Marinko Square, which soon became Rusjan Square, in a thirty-square-metre apartment, which was meant to eventually become my home. This, however, never happened. Our rented studio remained a part of a foreign world, which marginalized me and made me feel lonely on a daily basis, until the very day I said goodbye to Dusha. To call it a home, I would’ve needed someone of my own there with me, but most of the time I just co-existed with a woman who was tired and lost, and who continued to run away from me and her life until she let herself get tangled in the life of Dragan Ćirić.

We dropped off our four suitcases and two boxes at 13 Marinko Square, with the assistance of Irfan, the friendly cab driver who, like many other ex-Yugos, had beautiful memories of Pula from the time he spent there doing his military service. Soon after, the life that awaited me became clear. Almost at once, Dusha revealed her doubtless long, premeditated plan to speak only Slovene to me from that moment on. While she tried to provide a substantial, multipart explanation of her decision, from psychological, sociological and who knows what other aspects, I decided for myself that I would never speak a word of Slovene to her, no matter what. This was the first direct locking of horns of the two exemplars of Podlogar stubbornness, which Dusha had inherited from Dushan, and I had in turn inherited from her. With its cosmic dimension of a Greek tragedy, this led to a mother and son never speaking to each other in the same language again. We both spoke and lived past and around one another, although there were times when she tried to justify her decision, explaining how important my knowledge of Slovene would be since I would shortly start at a Slovenian school, with Slovenian classmates.

Duels of stubbornness were soon a regular feature in our small apartment; in the lift; in the lobby; even in shops. With an audience of a shelf lined with bread, a tired saleswoman, and nervous people lined up behind us, Dusha would repeat the question, ‘Would you like a poppy seed roll?’ over and over, for a few minutes, while I remained quiet until someone behind us yelled, ‘Smack him or buy it for him. We can’t wait here for you to raise him!’

Unfortunately, it never dawned on Dusha that what I needed was an ally, a friend, or a mother, much more than a well-intentioned immersion teacher of the Slovene language, who thought the most important thing was that I write imaginary essays and do my geography homework for school as soon as possible. She convinced herself that I would hit a language barrier unless she saved me by making up for having not spoken any Slovene for my first eleven years, and abruptly transforming me into her Slovenian child. Dusha believed that the correct use of the dual verb form, and a properly declined genitive, would provide an acceptable replacement for father, mother, friends, home and the sea. At least, that was how I saw it then. Now I’m closer to thinking that, in her own way, with love and a mother’s care, she was inviting me to finally move in to her Slovenian world, imagining that the successful transfer, or restart, would allow me to be a happy, cheerful boy again, as I had been in Pula. I was too young and sensitive not to resent this, and never admitted to her how badly I wanted to swim in this new ocean into which she had thrown me. I hid the fact that I watched Slovenian television, that I practiced repeating aloud the words of TV presenters and cartoon characters, that I absorbed the words of strangers in the lift, at shops and everywhere I could, to try to extract meaning without asking for it. I also hid how carefully I listened to her words, trying to understand and remember them.

I took great care to ensure that she never noted my interest. Whenever I heard the door unlocking, I switched the channel on the TV as a precaution, knowing that she would be encouraged and delighted by my voluntary viewing of a Slovenian programme, which would tip the scales in our duel to her side. Dusha probably never heard just how well I could say nasvidenje, ‘goodbye,’ when I left the lift after just a few days in our new flat. I was so proud of my second spoken Slovenian word that I was soon saying it, loud and clear. When riding in the lift, I began to look forward to using it, and was disappointed if I rode alone. I even began to wait intentionally in front of the empty lift, hoping someone would join me, just so I could say goodbye upon leaving.

Of course, not everyone in the area spoke Slovene. I’d say that the majority communicated in their mother tongues, fellow emigrants from elsewhere in what would soon be ex-Yugoslavia. Saying nasvidenje caused them much more trouble than it caused me, saying it all wrong, incomprehensibly, or not even trying to say it at all. During my early rides in the lift, which impressed me anyway because we hadn’t had one in our building in Pula, I heard some pretty funny variations on the word. I could catch them twisting their tongues around the simplest Slovene words, even people who were thirty, forty, fifty years old. Sometimes I felt sorry for them, but most of the time I’d nearly laugh. Every time I made a commitment that I would never be one of them, and that I’d be speaking Slovene sooner or later, so impeccably that no one would know where I had come from.

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Our situation became more or less similar to our stay at the Bristol Hotel in Belgrade, only minus father’s late night phone calls, and with my mother going to work at the Polyclinic, rather than just for long walks. I didn’t know what she was doing, and was a little fuzzy on what a ‘Polyclinic’ was. I just thought it was the strange name of a Slovenian company, and she never bothered explaining it to a seemingly uninterested kid. If not for the inevitable approach of my first day of school, I’d have reverted again into the zone of that bearable temporariness of hotel room 211, where I’d waited for the world to start turning in the opposite direction, to return me to our flat in Pula and my friends.

My mother attentively watched the news every evening while I, with my back to the TV and seemingly engrossed in books or comics, eavesdropped on every word, trying to decipher the coded messages of adults in this foreign language. Evening after evening, my mother simply sighed deeply: her only audible reaction. The names of those on centre stage of this war remained the same, but they were accented differently from what I was used to. Every day it became less and less clear to me what was actually going on. I don’t know why, whether it was my mother’s sighs or the way the Slovenian newscasters sounded so serious, but I had the feeling that the war was getting worse and worse, rather than fading out. My fears for my father increased. His name was never mentioned on the news, and I had no idea if that was good or not.

In this mounting tension, co-created by the approach of school in this new environment, and my father’s disappearance, even my stalwart Podlogar stubbornness buckled for a moment, and I asked my mother, ‘When’s Dad going to come?’ To which she replied, probably in complete surprise and unpreparedness for my question, ‘You mean, ‘When is Father going to come?’’

Dusha tried to take her words back immediately and apologize, though without speaking a word, only with a gaze I pretended not to see and touches I shied from. Infinitely offended, I pulled away from her until I finally locked myself in the bathroom, where I made the definitive decision never to ask her anything about my father, ever again. Through the closed door, Dusha tried to explain something about how she didn’t know when it would all end, but she was sure he would come soon, that this was his job and that he would return when his job was done. She spoke Slovene and I could only guess at what she wanted to tell me so I started to yell and finally drowned her out, repeating: ‘I don’t understand you! I don’t understand you! I don’t understaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaandyouuuuuuuuuuuuuu!’ I screamed until she shut up, and defeated, slowly moved away from the door. I felt that we were moving away from each other forever.